Alex Miller
A Scottish miner was walking home one night with a bunch of pheasants he had poached from a local landowner's estate when the landowner appeared and demanded that the miner hand over the pheasants. "Why should I hand them over to you?", asked the miner. "Because this is my land and those are my pheasants", the landowner replied.
"OK", said the miner, "where did you get the land from?" "From my father", said the landowner. "So where did your father get it?", the miner asked. The landowner replied: "From his father, who got it from his father, and so on. This land has belonged to my family for 500 years!"
"Well", the miner continued, "how did your family get it 500 years ago?" "Oh, they fought for it", answered the landowner. "OK then", the miner said, "take off your jacket and I'll fight you for it!"
This story, attributed to Andy Wightman by Scottish Socialist Party leaders Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan in their book Imagine, reveals the hypocrisy of those, like the rich landowner, who piously criticise ordinary workers for "breaking the law". It also reveals the futility of trying to defend workers' conditions and rights while slavishly respecting government legislation.
Initially, the ALP right and most union leaderships in Australia adopted this stance on PM John Howard's industrial relations "reforms". The ACTU was initially opposed to the mass actions that took place in Australia on June 30-July 1 and November 15. However, pressure from below and from the more militant trends within the unions — especially in Victoria and Western Australia — eventually forced the right to endorse the mass actions. ACTU head Greg Combet even told the massive November 15 protest in Melbourne that he would refuse to pay any fine imposed for failing to comply with the new IR laws.
It is crucial that the pressure from below and from the left on the ACTU and the ALP is kept up: even at the November 15 rallies, in which they were forced to adopt a more combative stance against the IR legislation, the speeches by Combet in Melbourne and Unions NSW leader John Robertson in Sydney still laid primary emphasis on getting rid of Howard by electing an ALP government at the next federal election.
The Socialist Alliance believes that the strategy of concentrating on "holding Howard to account at the next election" will eventually lead to the defeat of the mass movement against the IR laws, which must be beaten before the next election on the streets and in the workplaces, by industrial action, mass protests and, if necessary, breaking the law.
After the 600,000-strong November 15 rallies, it is instructive to think back to Britain in the late 1980s and early '90s, when PM Margaret Thatcher's seemingly unbeatable right-wing government was attempting to impose the barbaric "poll tax" on the British people.
Like Howard, Thatcher had an absolute parliamentary majority, and like the initial stance of the ALP and the ACTU, the British Labour Party's advice to ordinary people was to comply with the poll tax legislation while campaigning for the return of a Labour government down the track.
In her arrogance, however, Thatcher made the mistake of giving the poll tax a trial run in Scotland, and ran into the Anti-Poll Tax Federation. This was a grassroots campaign centered around local Anti-Poll Tax Unions that organised mass non-payment of the tax and non-payment of fines, and that ensured that the local (Labour!) councils could not impose warrant sales on those unable or unwilling to pay the tax.
Inspired by the Scottish campaign and by the likes of Tommy Sheridan, who spent months in prison for his part in the campaign, 13 million people nationwide refused to pay the tax and 200,000 marched against it in London in 1990. Despite opposition from the Labour Party, which merely advocated "holding the Tories to account at the next general election", mass action by ordinary people brought down the poll tax, and ultimately Thatcher herself.
In Scotland, the poll tax victory sowed the seeds for the growth of a new political force, the Scottish Socialist Alliance, which eventually transformed itself into the Scottish Socialist Party.
Like Sheridan and the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, the Socialist Alliance in Australia refuses to concentrate on "holding the government to account at the next election". Just like the poll tax, Howard's IR laws can be beaten by a campaign involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.
Socialist Alliance union activists are discussing with other militants ideas for further mass mobilisations early next year, and for building the biggest ever May Day demonstration in 2006. The Socialist Alliance says: "Make IR 'reform' Howard's poll tax!"
[Alex Miller is a member of the Green Left Weekly-Socialist Alliance editorial board. Copies of Imagine can be ordered at <http://www.resistancebooks.com/catalog/index.php>.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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